Varun Kumar

This master plan for a small architecture campus in the Gold Coast of Chicago sought to interface with the neighborhood while providing a semi-public urban campus for students, faculty, and visitors. The program consisted of an exhibition hall, studio, library, and classroom building adjacent to the existing carriage house and Archbishop's residence. American campus precedents were studied to help create a combination of casual and formal spaces, as well as to guide the design of the four Georgian academic buildings.

The street elevation is inspired by Georgian precedents in the neighborhood and in England with a characteristic mix of brick and limestone. Industrial warehouses and academic architecture buildings by McKim, Mead & White at Harvard and Columbia were also studied with the goal of providing ample amounts of fenestration and light.

The program included an ordered double-height grand room, studios, offices, and galleries. The parti for the design was to provide not only studio functionality, but opportunities for gathering, which are integral to the studio learning environment. Central vertical and horizontal axes were used to place vertical circulation and the most important rooms.

The master plan provided an atrium between the studio and classroom buildings on the courtyard side.

The project included a technical wall section to study how the building would be constructed. Load-bearing masonry, interior rigid board insulation, and light timber framing were used for the building envelope.